Get a glimpse of the long-awaited Steam redesign

Valve teased it in a presentation in January.

A Steam redesign has been simmering away at Valve for a few years, with only the occasional tweets from employees and leaks confirming its existence. Back in January, Valve put together a gathering for game developers, during which it gave a presentation on Steam and, apparently, the redesign. SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik has posted a slide on Twitter that allegedly comes from that presentation.

Just remembered that Valve's been working on a Steam redesign for years now. Here's a picture from a presentation in January.It certainly doesn't look like the SteamU leak from 2 years ago: https://t.co/KjoRK8OnLA pic.twitter.com/2fG2acIIz8November 25, 2018

It’s a bit of a jumble, a collage of Rainbow Six Siege screenshots surrounding a drowned out update post. It’s busy and hard to parse, but it’s also been cropped, so we’re not seeing the whole thing. It bears some resemblance to the publisher and developer homepages that Valve introduced in June, so perhaps Valve’s already started slipping in ideas from the redesign.

Notably, it looks nothing like the leaked images that were discovered in the Steam client beta back in 2017. Those images also showed off the top bar, featuring new sections for comics and TV, and a flashy, bespoke game page for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Who knows what it will look like in another year?

Valve’s also developing its first new game in ages since 2016’s Vive mini-game compilation, The Lab. With Artifact on its way, Valve says that it’s in a place where it can invest and focus on games again. "Artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us,” Gabe Newell said. “So that's sort of good news. Hooray! Valve's going to start shipping games again."

Fraser is the sole inhabitant of PC Gamer's mythical Scottish office, conveniently located in his flat. He spends most of his time wrangling the news, but sometimes he sneaks off to write lots of words about strategy games.